child. Populated by tenacious and finely
nuanced characters, this novel presents a
vivid picture of a dark time in American
history. Combining faith with extreme
human courage, Maxon and Young offer
the reader an extraordinary, inspirational
tale. (BookLife)

“I’m dressed like a Jamestown can-nibal/ In a city of mistake babies with
e-cash,” writes Amling in an astute and
challenging debut collection that’s both
deeply poignant and darkly humorous.

Like a deadpan oracle or font of offbeat
wisdom you didn’t know you needed to
know, Amling acts as a guide through the
ersatz Epicureanism of contemporary
America, where “freedom still remains
monetary.” He opens with a brief series
poems that are composed of cuts and out-takes—“Like a polygraph of a satellite”—
that serves as a junkyard ars poetica. A
visual artist adept in the medium of collage, he expresses these poems as social
critique delivered through a signal scrambler. But his critique often extends to the
practice of making art itself: “I know
many people living lives of artistic prac-tice/ that cannot take care of themselves,/
and not out of paraplegic circumstance.//
Art has not refined them.” Reading
through “Ill Estates,” “Rare and Special
Interests,” and “Liquid Assets,” one
encounters characteristically playful statements such as “It is not so hard/ To accept
meaninglessness/ Acceptance is very
meaningful.” Amling has designed a gallery installation of poetry that one returns
to for the pleasure of its unsolvable mysteries, “A collection of space/ That I
curate/ Where I forgive myself.” (July)

Phillips (The Ground), in his second col-lection, deals in illusions, highlightingthe hidden wonders he finds within theworld. In measured poems that echo con-versations one might have in a museum,Phillips presents scenes that build tofinal-line revelations. Along the way, hemulls various aspects of the concept ofheaven—the realness of it, the mutationsof it. Phillips opens in “Perpetual peace.

Perpetual light,” yet “it all seems graffiti.” In order to investigate more deeply,
he analyzes scenes from Dante and Homer,
even turning to artist Chuck Close, a
fellow illusionist. Close’s paintings appear
to be hyperrealistic portraits from far
away, but when seen up close, they disintegrate into small dots and blobs of dissonant color, as if Close were painting the
atoms of his subjects. In his quest to see
beyond the visible into the atoms of the
world, Phillips has a transformative experience in viewing one of Close’s paintings.

The poet also discovers that it is possible
for people to find heaven in each other,
and that heaven always shifts and changes;
it is indefinable. Phillips is awestruck by
that ambiguity, and though he doesn’t see
the pearly gates in his source material, he
revels in the search. (June)

Nearly a decade in the making, Kyger’s(About Now: Collected Poems) much-antici-pated new collection bursts with sponta-neity, wit, and a delightful swiftness akinto “the wheel/ of mind restless as fivemonkeys/ running in place.” Now 80, shewrites that she doesn’t “like the word‘old’/ when speaking about myself—/preferring the word ‘mature’,” and sheretains the wildness of the beat genera-tion and Black Mountain School in hersprawling form, seasoned by her manytravels and commitment to ZenBuddhism. Each poem is marked with itsdate of composition, as though jotted offin flashes of inspiration, and the contentflits from world politics to journeys inOaxaca, Mexico, to reminiscences of latefriends such as conservationist PeterWarshall, fellow poet Allen Ginsberg,and artist Arthur Okamura (to whom thebook is dedicated). Though there aretwinges of sorrow, they always appearwith an irrepressible, almost self-depre-cating humor: “It’s all right to feel glumwhile cooking the oyster stew,” shewrites. Kyger never lacks for source mate-rial—“‘Everything’ is poetry, animated,kicking its heels”—and in celebratingher own “Mega-Maturity” she states that“understanding the grief of passing withclarity gives every moment a monu-mental heart.” (June)

Slovenian poet and critic Debeljak
(Without Anesthesia: New and Selected Poems)
examines isolation, reconstruction, and
historical and cultural change in post-independence Slovenia. Set in various
locations around his home city, Ljubljana,
this series of tonally folksy, yet formally
rigid, long-lined poems (each in four quatrains) echoes with the mingling of historical and personal intimacies that
haunts the speaker at every turn: “hidden
sins are public virtues/ and all conversations are recorded, microphones are in the
wall,” he writes, “and the dark sheen of
freedom: see you in the next war.” The
book is distinctly historical, and thereby
political, yet Debeljak’s insistence on
formal consistency, humor, and adherence
to his subject, along with translator
Henry’s efforts at retaining his syntactical
and cultural idiosyncrasies, put the personal, and traditional, experience of those
historical events at the forefront of this
collection. A troubled national history
and the continuing traumas of a young
nation may well strike readers as the heart
of the collection: “your words sound sincere when they are least true,/ the shapes
of orange explosions would deserve the
attention/ that every developed nation
devotes to its sages,/ new styles of reading
and promises broken like jumps/ over
flames.” Debeljak’s engaging, accessible,
eye-opening poems turn cultural dislocation into its own strange pleasure.

Bilingual edition. (June)

Breezeway

John Ashbery. Ecco, $22.99 (128p) ISBN 978-

0-06-238702-8

In the title poem of his latest collection,
Ashbery (Quick Question), arguably the
most highly lauded living American poet,
writes, “We have to live out our precise
experimentation./ Otherwise there’s no
dying for anybody,/ no crisp rewards.”